Continued...
It was 1300 hours. 5 hours have elapsed already from the time we started from the pass, an hour more than what the locals said would be required to complete the trek. We passed by Thanleygang village on our right, on the other side of the valley an hour back (which we thought was the destination), and the trail doesn't seem to end. In fact, it was moving into more denser forests with the trail now under water that was flowing from the rainy summits of the hills, turning the trail into a bogged down pain in the backside.
Every half hour, we had to stop and check ourselves for leeches - and mind you, we had a hell a lot of them. I found two lost somewhere in my beard, Bose had his feet being feasted on to the point that there was an open wound, and Lucky - well, head over to this picture to see her leech-status.
Somehow, we kept on pushing and the instead of the original 4 km of trek, we ended up covering 16 km by the time we came out of the jungle into rice fields and some villages. The locals here were saying that Punakha - our destination was another 4 hours away by walk (it was already 1800 hrs). We begrudgingly started walking thinking of what to do, at least happy that we were able to see people for the first time in the day.
We tried speaking to a couple of villagers about getting a taxi or a vehicle to go to Punakha, but they couldn't understand Hindi or English and we couldn't understand their Dzongkha. Using signs, we asked an old man to lead us to a vehicle (gaddi, driver, punakha -these were the words we repeatedly used), and he motioned for us to follow him, which we did.
He took us to his home, and tried calling somebody on his phone, to no avail - maybe there was no answer, and then he got us down to the nearby road and asked us to follow the road while he goes ahead and searches for a vehicle. Gosh these people were helpful.
We kept walking on the road pointed out to us. The sun set and darkness enveloped us, but we kept walking, in hope of seeing that old man who walked ahead to help us, however, we found another guy, thankfully who speaks Hindi and asked him where we could get a vehicle.
He lead us to a house, who had a Maruti Omni, not a taxi but a private vehicle, who agreed to drop us till Khuruthang (as Punakha doesn't have any accommodation available) in that night.
Thanking the gods and the man for this gesture, we got into the Omni, and bid adieu to our exhilarating frightening experience in the hills of the last Shangri La.
The End.
